Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-06T01:47:26.289Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Tradable Body Parts? How Bone and Recycled Prosthetic Devices Acquire a Price without Forming a ‘Market’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2009

Klaus Hoeyer
Affiliation:
University of Copenhagen, Department of Public Health, Oester Farimagsgade 5, Room 10.0.09, 1014 Copenhagen K, Denmark E-mail: k.hoeyer@pubhealth.ku.dk
Get access

Abstract

Exchange of material originating in human bodies is essential to many health technologies but potentially conflicts with a prominent moral ideal according to which human bodies and their parts are beyond trade. In this article, I suggest that the inclination to keep bodies apart from ‘commercial exchange’ has significant implications for the way their parts come to be exchanged. The analysis revolves around two versions of the hip: one prosthetic version made of metal and one version made of bone, the femoral head, which is excised in conjunction with hip replacements and later used for transplantation. How are exchange systems for something moving in and out of human beings organized? Who provides what and who receives what? When and where does money change hands? How are the specific amounts determined? By answering these questions, I provide a description of the exchange form that avoids assuming it to be simply a ‘market’ or a ‘gift economy’. I focus on the mechanisms that allow money to be generated despite the moral ideal viewing body parts as beyond trade—or, rather, the how the ideal facilitates mechanisms through which money can be generated without being viewed as profit. In particular, I suggest that ‘compensation’ is an important example of a mechanism in need of further scrutiny.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs (2007). Overview: Delivery and regulation of UK transfusion and transplant services, URL (accessed April 2008): http://www.advisorybodies.doh.gov.uk/acsbto/induction.htmGoogle Scholar
Agrawal, C.M. (1998). Reconstructing the human body using biomaterials. Journal of Materials, 50, 3135.Google Scholar
Alter, J.S. (2007). The once and future ‘apeman’: Chimeras, human evolution, and disciplinary coherence. Current Anthropology, 48, 637652.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, J., Neary, F., & Pickstone, J.V. (2007). Surgeons, manufacturers and patients: A transatlantic history of total hip replacement. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andrews, L.B. (2005). Harnessing the benefits of biobanks. Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 33, 2230.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Appadurai, A. (1986). Introduction: Commodities and the politics of value. In Appadurai, A. (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective, 3–63. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bloch, M., & Parry, J. (1989). Introduction: Money and the morality of exchange. In Parry, J., & Bloch, M. (Eds), Money and the morality of exchange, 1–32. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.Google Scholar
Bolton, C. (2008). Introduction: The limits of ‘the limits of the human’. In Lunning, F. (Ed.), Limits of the human, xi–xvi. Minneapolis: U Minneapolis Press.Google Scholar
Brown, N., Faulkner, A., Kent, J., & Michael, M. (2006). Regulating hybridity: Policing pollution in tissue engineering and transpecies transplantation. In Webster, A. (Ed.), New technologies in health care: Challenge, change and innovation, 194–210. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Callon, M. (1998). The embeddedness of economic markets in economics. In Callon, M. (Ed.), The laws of the markets, 1–57. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Carrier, J.G. (Ed.) (1997). Meanings of the market: The free market in western culture. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Charo, R.A. (2004). Legal characterizations of human tissue. In Youngner, S.J., Anderson, M.W., & Schapiro, R. (Eds), Transplanting human tissue: Ethics, policy and practice, 101–119. Oxford: Oxford UP.Google Scholar
Cheney, A. (2006). Body brokers: Inside America’s underground trade in human remains. New York: Broadway Books.Google Scholar
Copeman, J. (2005). Veinglory: Exploring processes of blood transfer between persons, Journal of Royal Anthropological Insitute, 11, 465485.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dickenson, D. (2007). Property in the body: Feminist perspectives. New York: Cambridge UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Douglas, M. (1995). Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo, London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fabre, C. (2006). Whose body is it anyway? Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Franklin, S., & Lock, M. (2003). Animation and cessation: The remaking of life and death. In Franklin, S., & Lock, M. (Eds), Remaking life and death: Toward an anthropology of the biosciences, 3–22. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press/James Currey.Google Scholar
Gibson-Graham, J.K. (2006). The end of capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy. Minneapolis: U Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Goodwin, M. (2006). Black markets: The supply and demand of body parts. New York: Cambridge UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haraway, D.J. (2000). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminsim in the late twentieth century. In Badmington, N. (Ed.), Posthumanism, 85–97. Hampshire: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Healy, K. (2006). Last best gift: Altruism and the market for human blood and organs. Chicago: U Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hetherington, K. (2004). Secondhandedness: Consumption, disposal, and absent presence, Environment and Planning D: Society and Spaces, 22, 157173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoeyer, K. (2007). Person, patent and property: A critique of the commodification hypothesis, BioSocieties, 2, 327348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holland, S. (2001). Contested commodities at both ends of life: Buying and selling gametes, embryos, and body tissues, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, 11, 263284.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ingold, T. (1988). Introduction. In Ingold, T. (Ed.), What is an animal?, 1–16. Oxford: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
Joyce, M.J. (2005). Safety and FDA regulations for musculoskeletal allografts: Perspective of an orthopaedic surgeon, Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research, 435, 2230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kimbrell, A. (1993). The human body shop: The engineering and marketing of life. London: Harper Collins Religious.Google Scholar
Marcus, G.E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Margulis, L., & Sagan, D. (1987). Microcosmos: Four billion years of evolution from our microbial ancestors. London: Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Mauss, M. (2000). The gift: The form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Merx, H., Dreinhöfer, K., Schräder, P., Stürmer, T., Puhl, W., Günther, K.-P., et al. (2003). International variation in hip replacement rates, Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, 62, 222226.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Munzer, S.R. (1993). Kant and property rights in body parts, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 6, 319341.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parry, B. (2004a). Bodily transactions: Regulating a new space of flows in ‘bio-information’. In Verdery, K., & Humphrey, C. (Eds), Property in question: Value transformation in the global economy, 29–68. Oxford: Berg.Google Scholar
Parry, B. (2004b). Trading the genome: Investigating the commodification of bio-information. New York: Columbia UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pfeffer, N. (2009). Histories of tissue banking. In Brubaker, S., Fehily, D., & Warwick, R. (Eds), Tissue and cell donation: An essential guide. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Radin, M.J., & Sunder, M. (2005). The subject and object of commodification. In Ertman, M.M., & Williams, J.C. (Eds), Rethinking commodification: Cases and readings in law and culture, 8–29. New York: New York UP.Google Scholar
Rajan, K.S. (2006). Introduction: Capitalisms and biotechnologies. In Rajan, K.S. (Ed.), Biocapital. The constitution of postgenomic life, 1–36. London: Duke UP.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sahlins, M. (1972). The spirit of the gift. In Sahlins, M. (Ed.), Stone age economics, 149–183. Chicago: Aldine Atherton Inc.Google Scholar
Scheper-Hughes, N. (2002). Commodifying bodies. London: SAGE.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sharp, L.A. (2007). Bodies, commodities, and biotechnologies: Death, mourning, and scientific desire in the realm of human organ transfer. New York: Columbia UP.Google Scholar
Skegg, P.D.G. (1975). Human corpses, medical specimens and the law of property, Anglo-American Law Review, 4, 412424.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Svendsen, M.N., & Koch, L. (2008). Unpacking the ‘spare embryo’: Facilitating stem cell research in a moral landscape, Social Studies of Science, 38, 93110.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Timmermans, S. (2006). Postmortem: How medical examiners explain suspicious deaths. Chicago: U Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, M. (1979). Rubbish theory: The creation and destruction of value. Oxford: Oxford UP.Google Scholar
Tomford, W.W. (2007). Bone allografts: Past, present and future, Cell and Tissue Banking, 1, 105109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turkle, S. (Ed.) (2008). The inner history of devices. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vangsness, C.T., Wagner, P.P., Moore, T.M., & Roberts, M.R. (2006). Overview of safety issues concerning the preparation and processing of soft-tissue allografts, Arthroscopy: The Journal of Arthroscopy and Related Surgery, 22, 13511358.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Waldby, C., & Mitchell, R. (2006). Tissue economies: Blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism. London: Duke UP.Google Scholar
Webster, A. (2006). Introduction: New technologies in health care: Opening the black bag. In Webster, A. (Ed.), New technologies in health care: Challenge, change and innovation, 1–8. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilson, P.D. (1947). Experiences with a bone bank, Annals of Surgery, 126, 932946.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Zelizer, V.A. (1998). The proliferation of social currencies. In Callon, M. (Ed.), The laws of the market, 58–68. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Google Scholar